Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

Our dear friend laughed. Another great day, she said. Wasn’t it? I remember you two sizing up the men. I had one at the time — I thought. Some joke. Here, take it. I have two copies. But you ought to get it enlarged. When this you see, remember me. Ha-ha. Well, girls — excuse me, I mean ladies — it’s time for me to rest.

She took Susan’s arm and continued that awful walk to her bed.

We didn’t move. We had a long journey ahead of us and had expected a little more comforting before we set off.

No, she said. You’ll only miss the express. I’m not in much pain. I’ve got lots of painkiller. See?

The tabletop was full of little bottles.

I just want to lie down and think of Abby.

It was true, the local could cost us an extra two hours at least. I looked at Ann. It had been hard for her to come at all. Still, we couldn’t move. We stood there before Selena in a row. Three old friends. Selena pressed her lips together, ordered her eyes into cold distance.

I know that face. Once, years ago, when the children were children, it had been placed modestly in front of J. Hoffner, the principal of the elementary school.

He’d said, No! Without training you cannot tutor these kids. There are real problems. You have to know how to teach .

Our PTA had decided to offer some one-to-one tutorial help for the Spanish kids, who were stuck in crowded classrooms with exhausted teachers among little middle-class achievers. He had said, in a written communication to show seriousness and then in personal confrontation to prove seriousness, that he could not allow it. And the board of ed itself had said no. (All this no-ness was to lead to some terrible events in the schools and neighborhoods of our poor yes-requiring city.) But most of the women in our PTA were independent — by necessity and disposition. We were, in fact, the soft-speaking tough souls of anarchy.

I had Fridays off that year. At about 11 A.M. I’d bypass the principal’s office and run up to the fourth floor. I’d take Robert Figueroa to the end of the hall, and we’d work away at storytelling for about twenty minutes. Then we would write the beautiful letters of the alphabet invented by smart foreigners long ago to fool time and distance.

That day, Selena and her stubborn face remained in the office for at least two hours. Finally, Mr. Hoffner, besieged, said that because she was a nurse, she would be allowed to help out by taking the littlest children to the modern difficult toilet. Some of them, he said, had just come from the barbarous hills beyond Maricao. Selena said O.K., she’d do that. In the toilet she taught the little girls which way to wipe, as she had taught her own little girl a couple of years earlier. At three o’clock she brought them home for cookies and milk. The children of that year ate cookies in her kitchen until the end of the sixth grade.

Now, what did we learn in that year of my Friday afternoons off? The following: Though the world cannot be changed by talking to one child at a time, it may at least be known.

Anyway, Selena placed into our eyes for long remembrance that useful stubborn face. She said, No. Listen to me, you people. Please. I don’t have lots of time. What I want… I want to lie down and think about Abby. Nothing special. Just think about her, you know.

In the train Susan fell asleep immediately. She woke up from time to time, because the speed of the new wheels and the resistance of the old track gave us some terrible jolts. Once, she opened her eyes wide and said, You know, Ann’s right. You don’t get sick like that for nothing. I mean, she didn’t even mention him.

Why should she? She hasn’t even seen him, I said. Susan, you still have him-itis, the dread disease of females.

Yeah? And you don’t? Anyway, he was around quite a bit. He was there every day, nearly, when the kid died.

Abby. I didn’t like to hear “the kid.” I wanted to say “Abby” the way I’ve said “Selena”—so those names can take thickness and strength and fall back into the world with their weight.

Abby, you know, was a wonderful child. She was in Richard’s classes every class till high school. Goodhearted little girl from the beginning, noticeably kind — for a kid, I mean. Smart.

That’s true, said Ann, very kind. She’d give away Selena’s last shirt. Oh, yes, they were all wonderful little girls and wonderful little boys.

Chrissy is wonderful, Susan said.

She is , I said.

Middle kids aren’t supposed to be, but she is. She put herself through college — I didn’t have a cent — and now she has this fellowship. And, you know, she never did take any crap from boys. She’s something.

Ann went swaying up the aisle to the bathroom. First she said, Oh, all of them — just wohunderful.

I loved Selena, Susan said, but she never talked to me enough. Maybe she talked to you women more, about things. Men.

Then Susan fell asleep.

Ann sat down opposite me. She looked straight into my eyes with a narrow squint. It often connotes accusation.

Be careful — you’re wrecking your laugh lines, I said.

Screw you, she said. You’re kidding around. Do you realize I don’t know where Mickey is? You know, you’ve been lucky. You always have been. Since you were a little kid. Papa and Mama’s darling.

As is usual in conversations, I said a couple of things out loud and kept a few structural remarks for interior mulling and righteousness. I thought: She’s never even met my folks. I thought: What a rotten thing to say. Luck — isn’t it something like an insult?

I said, Annie, I’m only forty-eight. There’s lots of time for me to be totally wrecked — if I live, I mean.

Then I tried to knock wood, but we were sitting in plush and leaning on plastic. Wood! I shouted. Please, some wood! Anybody here have a matchstick?

Oh, shut up, she said. Anyway, death doesn’t count.

I tried to think of a couple of sorrows as irreversible as death. But truthfully nothing in my life can compare to hers: a son, a boy of fifteen, who disappears before your very eyes into a darkness or a light behind his own, from which neither hugging nor hitting can bring him. If you shout, Come back, come back, he won’t come. Mickey, Mickey, Mickey, we once screamed, as though he were twenty miles away instead of right in front of us in a kitchen chair; but he refused to return. And when he did, twelve hours later, he left immediately for California.

Well, some bad things have happened in my life, I said.

What? You were born a woman? Is that it?

She was, of course, mocking me this time, referring to an old discussion about feminism and Judaism. Actually, on the prism of isms, both of those do have to be looked at together once in a while.

Well, I said, my mother died a couple of years ago and I still feel it. I think Ma sometimes and I lose my breath. I miss her. You understand that. Your mother’s seventy-six. You have to admit it’s nice still having her.

She’s very sick, Ann said. Half the time she’s out of it.

I decided not to describe my mother’s death. I could have done so and made Ann even more miserable. But I thought I’d save that for her next attack on me. These constrictions of her spirit were coming closer and closer together. Probably a great enmity was about to be born.

Susan’s eyes opened. The death or dying of someone near or dear often makes people irritable, she stated. (She’s been taking a course in relationships and interrelationships.) The real name of my seminar is Skills: Personal Friendship and Community. It’s a very good course despite your snide remarks.

While we talked, a number of cities passed us, going in the opposite direction. I had tried to look at New London through the dusk of the windows. Now I was missing New Haven. The conductor explained, smiling: Lady, if the windows were clean, half of you’d be dead. The tracks are lined with sharpshooters.